


winter oceans and other songs

by Humanities_Handbag



Category: Coco (2017)
Genre: F/M, Gen, HEY Y'ALL, Making Héctor cry is my hobby, Music, One Shot, Songs, WHO'S READY TO TALK ABOUT ANGST, aaaaaah that's some good angst, grabs a can of tears and cracks that baby open, takes a long sip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-10 10:33:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13500090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Humanities_Handbag/pseuds/Humanities_Handbag
Summary: in which héctor sings nonsense, listens to imelda, forgets faces, and is in debt for one million hugs





	winter oceans and other songs

His daughter begs nightly for a song, and he gives her what she wants without questions. Silencing her queries with an attack of kisses that lead to giggles that lead to Imelda giving them both the  _look_  (one that has them bashfully shuffling up the stairs and conspiring out of her view) until he finally settles her under the covers and is kneeling by the bed. 

“My song!” she slaps her tiny hands on the covers with a  _whump_. “Canta mi canción, papá!“

He’s leaving again for a weeklong musical excursion with Ernesto who had, boldly and without much introduction, claimed that  _this_ would be it. The claim to their rightful pedestal. 

Héctor had bags already packed. This had not been the first apparent claim to pedestals, and his feet were becoming weary from the travel.

Though it was hardly anything compared to the ache when he left- daughter clutching his legs- Imelda’s knowing eyes following him out 

(is this the time you don’t come back- they say)

(never, he wants to promise, without quite knowing how) 

But right then, his fans (his  _true_  fans) are eager and demanding, and he’s laughing at the foot of the little bronze bed. “¡Se paciente!” He’s twisting the knobs at the end of his guitar, trying to push the sides of his smile down. “You’ll get a song!”

“ _My_  song.”

“Your song” he promises, serious, like it’s a pact between the two of them. 

(maybe it is). 

He sings it. Sometimes he adds in little jokes that have her squealing and snorting. He lives for that sound, just as she lives for this. 

“Bedtime,” he says afterward, propping his guitar on the wall. 

“Papá,  _no_!”

“ _Coco, yes_!” he imitates. 

She crawls under the covers but pauses to look up at him. She’s learning from Imelda, and he can’t wait to see what she looks like when she’s his wife’s age. He’s already predicting that she’ll be just as fierce. And brave. 

 _People who loved music were always the bravest_ , he thought. 

(They were the ones who let their hearts break the most)

“You’ll sing again tomorrow?”

“And the next day,” he swears. “But that won’t come if you don’t  _go to sleep_.”

She points at him. “No sharing my song,” she warns. “Or else.”

“Or else  _what_ , Mija.”

“Un millón abrazos” she says, stretching her arms out wide. “Your arms will  _fall off_  from all the hugs.” 

He nods, and crosses himself. “No sharing,” he promises. “Because you are so terribly intimidating and ’m so terribly afraid.” 

Imelda meets him in the hall. “Come to bed,” she says, winding her fingers through his. “Ernesto gets you tomorrow, I get you tonight.” 

Her eyes still ask when he’ll leave for good.

And so that night he lies in bed beside her and sings Imelda songs about love and moonshine and rum and women in loose dresses that dance to the beat of the winter ocean and hopes it’s enough. 

* * *

Héctor hears the song later on the radio while he limps down luminescent streets surrounded by the skeletons of yesteryear. It’ll croon over the radio out of a bar, and he’ll pause long enough to listen. 

If he’d had a heart, it would have leaped through his chest. 

Betrayal cuts deep.

If she heard… if she heard and thought that he’d-

Ernesto’s sins, for all that there were, were left incomparable to this. 

 _My song_ , he remembers, with copper beds and small hands.

 _Your song_. 

* * *

“Come to bed!” Imelda stands in front of his little work desk in the back of their house. “It’s after midnight, mi Amor. You can’t do this to yourself!”

“Ernesto needs new songs-”

“And I need a husband.” 

He scratches out a word and looks up at her. She’s all fire in the dark. Their town had just gotten electricity, and the flickering of the bulb behind her illuminates the tresses of black inky hair. She’d always had hair as dark as a cello. 

“Soon,” he promises. 

“Now,” she demands. And the pencil is taken from his hand, and she’s slipping their hands together. “Come. Coco needs her father to be awake in the morning. If I remember, she was promised a galavant in the park.”

He groaned, remembering, and already dreading the wakeup he knows he’ll receive. He looks down at his music. 

Ernesto would be so angry at him…

“Come to bed,” she says again. “And maybe I’ll distract the beast and give you an extra hour.”

He kisses her senseless at the top of the stairs. 

(Ernesto can wait)

* * *

He sees Imelda when she first arrives, and she’s still got cello hair and a fire behind her. He remembers songs about winter oceans and love, and he approaches her with apologies sewn into his tongue.

(I’m sorry…)

(that I left)

(that I couldn’t return)

(that you never knew)

She turns him away. He didn’t expect anything less, just as he didn’t expect the hurt. “You left,” she hisses, eyes alight with fresh electricity. “Leave again, Héctor. You’re best at that.” 

He does. 

* * *

He remembers Ernesto stalking away from him out of the bar. “You want to leave  _early_?”

“I have to get back to my wife, Ernesto. Coco’s sick and-“

“And there are doctors in Santa Cecilia, aren’t there?”

“Ernesto-“

“ _Aren’t there_?” 

Héctor pulls himself up straight. He’s not used to denying the broad man much, but he finds that it’s never been easier. “I’m going,” he says. “I’m leaving. Now.”

“ _Now_.”

“The train leaves in fifteen minutes. My daughter needs her song-“

Ernesto scoffs loud enough that the patrons outside turn their heads. “Her  _song_. That’s what this is about?”

Imelda had written him a letter, and it was folded up in his pocket. Their daughter had contracted something from the other children in the village. Something had spread round. Two toddlers had been laid to rest since and three more had received last rites. 

 _She wants her song_ , the letter had ended. And Héctor hadn’t thought twice. 

He wanted to cry. He wanted to press his hands into his eyes until he saw spots. 

Instead, he barrels past Ernesto. “She needs her song and her Papá,” says Héctor. 

“You’ll always choose her over this!” It’s not a question. 

They both know it doesn’t need to be. 

* * *

Héctor had gotten there by the time the danger had passed, and Imelda falls into his arms the moment he opens the door. 

They cry. Together, on the little couch, they cry. In relief, maybe. In exhaustion. 

“Don’t go,” she says. 

“Never.”

“You know that’s not true.”

He kisses her knuckles and ignores the way the barb has settled. “Not now, Imelda. Not right now. Please.” 

Coco will wake up to her Papá. 

Imelda will go to sleep with her husband. 

“Come to bed,” he’d whispered to the mother who needed her rest. And she’d fall asleep to the sound of him humming out the notes to a new song. One about life and sunshine and daughters and wives and garden walls covered in yellow roses. 

* * *

Héctor begins to forget himself before he’s forgotten. 

It’ll come in waves. 

What did Coco look like? What did Imelda used to sound like before age took her voice? She sounded just as beautiful. Just as wonderful. But he wonders what his might have been if he’d matched her. 

He forgets Coco’s bronze bed. And he forgets what the room smelled like (marigolds, maybe). 

He’s stopped writing music, but he finds a notebook and scribbles, so quickly, what he can remember. Eye colors and hair colors and the way their kitchen always looked. 

He needs to remember. 

It’s all he has. 

* * *

She’s crying in their bedroom, and he sits on the other side of the door and rests the back of his head against the sanded wood. “‘melda…” 

She sniffs. Snorts. She’d always been an ugly, loud cryer. “Go away…” 

“Please, ‘melda.”

“You’re leaving again.”

“Just for a little while.” He turns, twisting at the waist, and flinches when his back gives a soft  _krk_. He’s only 21, and he feels the weight of a family on him. “I’ll be back soon.”

“That’s what you said last time.”

“And I came back.”

There’s silence. A sniffle. “Two months… The last time was two months. The time before that, a month. The first time you’d gone it was a weekend. They’re getting longer-“

“Imelda.”

“That leech has you attached.”

He bristled. “Ernesto’s doing his best.”

“Ernesto is a  _coward_  without a family of his own.”

“That’s not fair.” 

(It is fair.)

(But he defends because…)

(Because…)

(He has no reason. Perhaps Ernesto just has that effect.)

“Imelda.  _Please_. I promise. I’ll be back. I’m always back.”

There’s a long silence. 

He hears a breath. 

She opens the door then. Héctor moves fast before he can fall back, and turns to face her. Her eyes are red and puffed, and her lip swollen from biting. “I don’t want to sleep in an empty bed, Héctor.”

His shoulders drop. “I know.” 

“I  _hate_  sleeping alone.”

“I know, ‘melda.”

“And raising Coco. Alone-“

“I’ll be back.”

She wraps her arms around herself, a poor substitute, and looks away. “I miss my husband. When you’re gone, Héctor- I sleep alone, I eat alone. I’m  _alone_.”

He wants to tell her that he’s alone, too. That when he’s off with Ernesto, he’s so utterly, completely, and all-encompassingly alone.

“I’ll write,” he says. She sniffles. “Every day, I’ll write. Poetry. Songs. Letters that you can never show anyone because they’ll be  _completely_  inappropriate that they’ll make Sister Marguerite toss me out of la Iglesia for heresy.” She actually laughs then, a wet, soft laugh, and he smiles. He stands.

She leans forward, and her brow rests against his collarbone. Her hair smells like citrus groves and pork fat and marigolds. “Tonight. I have you tonight.” He nods. “Come to bed,” she says. 

He complies. And that night, he’ll sing her a song of loose priests and naughty, ugly nuns named Juanita, and she’ll laugh too hard to remember that she’s crying herself to sleep. 

* * *

He draws their likeness on the wall of his shanty. 

He’d snagged a bit of chalk from Chicharrón and had drawn as best he could a little Imelda and a Coco. He’d never been exceptional at art, and it looks little more than stick figures. But they do well enough. 

They’re placed beside his bed -a worn, eaten mattress- and says goodnight to them no matter what. 

It’s a familiar ritual, and it keeps him grounded. 

“Papá’s writing you a new song,” he promises to chalk Coco. “One day you’ll dance to it. I’m sure you’re old enough now to really dance with Papá, ey?” 

She’d have been tall enough by then, he suspected. 

And when he finally managed to cross the bridge (next time- it would be next time) he’d see if he could keep up with her. 

Besides. Her song had been shared. And he intended on keeping true her threat of a million hugs. His arms would fall off safely now, at least. And he thought that she’d like that joke an awful lot. 

He hoped she remembered.

And to Imelda: “Mi Amor,” he says. “Mi Vida.” And then, “Come to bed.” 

Because that feels right. And natural. 

And even if he’s going to bed alone, he hopes she can feel the gentle command and remember when she’d once given it to him. 

* * *

It’ll be later, months later, when she’ll ask him about things she remembers. Things he’d forgotten. 

(But not really)

(Not fully)

“You used to write me songs,” she said.

“I used to write you lots of songs. They’re the ones people are singing.” and then, more cheerfully, “at least now they know who wrote them, ey?”

She nods, smiles. “Yes,” she agrees, “but not those songs. The songs in our-  _my_  bed.”  

“… your songs.”

“ _My songs_ ,” she reaffirms. “They were always… nonsense.” The way she says the word, with a fondness, an aching, he can tell they were quite the opposite to her. “About things like oceans in winter and yellow roses.” She swallows and then says “nonsense” again. 

Héctor remembers.

Slowly-

carefully-

wonderfully-

he remembers. 

He just hadn’t thought she would. 

“They were love songs,” he said. “For you. Only for you. Only for our bed.”

“They were nonsense.”

He doesn’t say that love, like music, is also nonsense and bravery and brokenness. Instead, he says, “you know… if you ever wanted me to sing them again…” 

She says “nonsense” and walks away. 

He didn’t miss the way her eyes had misted. 

* * *

The chalk drawings are washed away in the next few years. 

By the time Miguel arrives, Héctor has forgotten the likeness of his child. He hasn’t heard Imelda’s voice in years. 

When Miguel suggests that he sings a song, though…

That he remembers. 

“Not that song,” says Héctor.

“Why?”

 _My song_.

 _Your song_.

He pulls back on sepia and marigolds and bronze and ( _come to bed_ ). “It’s too popular.” 

 _My song,_ Coco sings triumphantly in his head. 

He’d forgotten her voice, but not her words, and that is in itself a comfort. 

* * *

It’ll be months before he’ll get to kiss her. And that’s all he wants.

He arrives each day, on time, guitar slung across his back. And the family (his family he supposes) greets him without so much as residual ire. Oscar and Felipe drag him this way and that, Julio already explaining his new shoe design, Victoria assessing him with cool eyes, and Rosita trying her best to feed him.

Imelda-

Imelda is cautious. He doesn’t blame her.

It’ll be months before he’ll get to kiss her. And that’s all he wants. He doesn’t expect more.

And yet

And yet

And yet

She invites him, slowly, back into her life. It’s a handhold during a late supper with the family, a knee against his at the workbench, a soft tug on the elbow. There’s more soft kisses against the backdrops of shoe shops. 

He’s glad for the little things, and he takes them as they come with direction.

And then, one late evening after he’d overstayed his welcome, sitting in the back desk lost in thought writing a new song, she strides down the stairs, plucks the pencil from his hand and says “come to my bed.”

It’s still her bed. For a long while. She says “come to my bed,” and “won’t you join me in my bed, Héctor” and “take your feet off my bed, Héctor, that’s not where shoes belong.”

He learns that she still can’t sleep alone.

She learns that neither can he.

But here? It’s different.

There are pictures of his family everywhere. He remembers things. Sounds. Smells. He wipes hard at his eyes and she touches his shoulder. "Do you... do you think she-"

"She remembers," says Imelda.

He writes everything into a song, just in case, and he hums it against the darkness, back propped against pillows. Songs about doctors and yellow fever and trains and bedroom doors and women who danced to winter waves.

* * *

He tells Chicharrón that he’s never going to get them back. He doesn’t want to hope to. And yet, he does.

“Hope is a wicked thing,” Chicharrón had said, teething on an old, unlit cigar.

Héctor agreed. But he was a musician. His heart was fallty from the start. “I’ll never see her again. Coco, maybe, but Imelda-“

“Probably not,” Chicharrón finishes. He flicks his cigar away. He’d always had a penchant for honesty, and it cuts deep, but is honest enough that Héctor can lean back against it. Like bedroom doors and crying on the other side of them, they’re familiar and terrible all the same.

“Learn to sit in the feelings,” his elder advises. “You get used to them, after a while.”

“I just… I want-“

Chicharrón scoffs. “We all want things.” He sits up. “Now, you were talking about borrowing my mini van?”

* * *

Héctor is afraid.

He doesn’t know what anything is. And so he tries his best to walk around it all with caution.

He’s used to broken hearts.

He just doesn’t know how much more he can take.

It had been a month of staying with Imelda. Of sleeping board straight before wandering off to find somewhere else. He’s afraid of overstepping. He doesn’t want her to realize…

To come to her senses…

But Imelda had always been fire. And he’d always been ash beneath her. And it’ll be soon after, while he sits in the kitchen nursing a tequila, that she’s leaning over his shoulder, looking as nervous as he feels. “Héctor…” she says. She swallows. “Come to bed?”

“Your bed-“

“Ours,” says Imelda. She flinches. “Unless-“

He kisses her senseless at the top of the stairs. The nostalgia leaves him teary-eyed and tight-throated.

That night he can’t come up with any words for songs.

It’s fine though. Imelda pulls him under the covers and winds arms around him, and he’s breathless at the feeling of home; remembering what that felt like.

“___ ___ ___” whispers Imelda.

_My song._

_Your song._

Some things are too private to be crooned over radios.

* * *

Coco arrives by the time her parents are sharing their bed and he’s remembering how to sing about loose nuns and garden walls again. “Papá” she’ll scold, with amusement set deep in her eyes, “you shared my song.”

He pauses his crying enough to comply.


End file.
